635 research outputs found
A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages
Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order
freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal
arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect
is referred to as ``scrambling'', and is interpreted in transformational
frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from
an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as
``long-distance scrambling''. While scrambling has recently received
considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance
scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the
problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly
dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due
to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not
immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly
complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should
assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on
scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical),
and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word
orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the
second view by presenting a processing model for German.Comment: 23 pages, uuencoded compressed ps file. In {\em Perspectives on
Sentence Processing}, C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier and K. Rayner, editors.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 199
D-Tree Grammars
DTG are designed to share some of the advantages of TAG while overcoming some
of its limitations. DTG involve two composition operations called subsertion
and sister-adjunction. The most distinctive feature of DTG is that, unlike TAG,
there is complete uniformity in the way that the two DTG operations relate
lexical items: subsertion always corresponds to complementation and
sister-adjunction to modification. Furthermore, DTG, unlike TAG, can provide a
uniform analysis for em wh-movement in English and Kashmiri, despite the fact
that the em wh element in Kashmiri appears in sentence-second position, and not
sentence-initial position as in English.Comment: Latex source, needs aclap.sty, 8 pages, to appear in ACL-9
LDC Arabic Treebanks and Associated Corpora: Data Divisions Manual
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has developed hundreds of data corpora
for natural language processing (NLP) research. Among these are a number of
annotated treebank corpora for Arabic. Typically, these corpora consist of a
single collection of annotated documents. NLP research, however, usually
requires multiple data sets for the purposes of training models, developing
techniques, and final evaluation. Therefore it becomes necessary to divide the
corpora used into the required data sets (divisions). This document details a
set of rules that have been defined to enable consistent divisions for old and
new Arabic treebanks (ATB) and related corpora.Comment: 14 pages; one cove
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